Jerry Lewis took the failure of the cinemas hard. He was sued by investors and franchise holders, and it took several years of his life to get this financial disaster behind him.
/Mitchell
Posted by Jeff Stricker (Member # 224) on 02-11-2003, 03:59 PM:
We had a Jerry Lewis Twin here in Kokomo, In. About the time it opened up, the Jerry Lewis chain went out of biz and it was operated by several locals, that last being a friend of mine (I did a little work on the sound gear for him). Each theater had a pair of Simplex 35's, Simplex sound heads (I forget which model), and 2 KW lamphouses. They were set up for 6,000 foot reels and tape cue automation. It was a nice place had bargain admission prices. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 02-11-2003, 06:30 PM:
How many of those J.L. cinemas later showed porno? ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
Posted by Paul Goulet (Member # 297) on 02-11-2003, 09:37 PM:
I remember the Jerry Lewis Cinema we had in Cumberland, RI. Many High school weekends were spent there watching movies. I remember seeing "Smokey and the Bandit" and numerous other movies. I also remember in the lobby a HUGE photo (mural?) of celebrities of the 70's & 80's. Did any other J.L. lobby also have that? The building is now split in half, with half being a jewelry store and the other half a equipment rental store. I was told recently that the equipment is still upstairs in the booth!
Paul Goulet
Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 02-11-2003, 10:01 PM:
My recollection of the Jerry Lewis program runs very much along what Mitchell related (good memory, by the way!).
The owners of the (only) theatre in the town I grew up in were approached about adding a J/L theatre. I don't recall any talk about concession requirements... setting up a national distribution network for Red Vines would have been interesting... but I do recall the strict guidelines, restrictions regarding ratings and the requirement that all booking be arranged through J/L. The booking issue was a huge negative to the local operator, because he had done his own for years.
Part of the package included some form of creative financing, with (of course) the J/L company carrying some kind of note after an investment of something along the lines of $10k or so in late '60s dollars. That, plus the franchise requirements would have really locked you up for a long time, even if the program had worked.
In the end, we passed on the "opportunity", and nobody else took them up. I've only seen one J/L cinema, which was in Roseburg, Oregon... built very much like earlier descriptions here, and now long gone.
Posted by Robert Golding (Member # 746) on 02-12-2003, 10:06 PM:
I remember them being everywhere in the early 70" here in california. All of them in northern california where the same. If you went up into the projection room you found out how they had cut corners everywhere. One good example was the projector heads. Seems they had the century sa's reworked so to save on costs. All of the projectors had plastic doors front and back as well as the gearing was made much lighter in these projectors. This was the same throughout the theatre. It's no wonder they didn't last long!
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-18-2003, 10:56 PM:
There were at least 4 of them in the Chicago area at one time. I did service work at all four locations at one time or another. One had Pro 35's, the others had Simlpex's.
One local union bombed one of the locations and did quite a bit of damage. Parts of the lobby were found a 1/4 mile away. (TRUE!)
Mark
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 06-16-2006, 01:54 PM:
It has been 1213 days since the last post.
Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 06-16-2006, 01:54 PM:
There were a number of Jerry Lewis Cinemas in Northern NJ. The one in Carteret still had the Jerry Lewis name and logo on the marquee up until it closed for good around 1982. That one was a twin with Century "C" projectors.
Rumored to be the 1st Jerry Lewis Cinema was the one located in the Ramapo Shopping Center in Wayne NJ. Jerry Lewis was there in person when it opened. Later in life, it was The Ramapo porno theatre, and then twined and run by several different independents as a first run theatre. It finally closed sometime in the last year.
The Meadtown Theatre in Kinnelon NJ and the Cinema 35 in Paramus NJ never carried the JL name, but were built as Jerry Lewis Cinemas just before the chain folded. The Cinema 35 closed a few years ago, and the Meadtown is now the Clearview Kinnelon 12's theatres 1-3. How they fit 3 theatres into a theatre that barely held 280 people as a single is beyond me. The other 9 auditoriums are in a different strip mall, on a side road directly behind the Meadtown strip mall.
Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 06-16-2006, 02:56 PM:
This week's Irondequoit Post newspaper actually has an article about the auto parts store that now occupies the former Jerry Lewis Theatre on Carter Street, and mentions the history of the building as a theatre.
Posted by Dan Zastrow (Member # 3796) on 06-24-2006, 02:53 PM:
My own run-in with the J-L theaters is very much like the others listed here...very cheap construction never intended to last long. But this one had an extra cost-cutting feature. They had no screen in this twin, it was sheet rock painted white with a "Voice Of The Theater" speaker in a cage in front of the wall. You could see the tape on the seams during the film! If the "screen" got dirty you simply got out the paint pan and roller. Years later I had a friend who wanted to throw together a screening room for one summer to show films for free to kids and I suggested this. His mudding job was a bit better and you couldn’t see the seams ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 06-27-2006, 08:36 AM:
No screen was NOT an authorized Jerry Lewis design. JL Cinemas were designed to be cheap to run, but if you followed their plans, were actually rather well designed small theatres. Most originally had curtains in front of the screen.
![[puke]](graemlins/puke.gif)
or a 35mm set up usually with the baby ORC lamphouses. The situation lasted only a few years since most investors and buyers where poorly equipped to handle the business. Translux was also doing this at the time with a like concept. Jerry Lewis lent his name and was trying to interest producers to create family fare for the proposed cinemas. He distanced himself from the company when things began to fall apart.....I did several insurance adjustment claims for abandoned and vandilized locations. A few years later there was TDC which did the same thing with twins and fourplexes and they made an attempt to better train the people. I personally did more than 200 of these cinemas in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1970's - early 80's. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)